The birds and the bees...

I talked to the nurse at the fertility clinic today. She has been such great support through all this. She’s all super-chatty, which I love. I can tell she’s got things going on that she needs to get done, but if it takes me 45 minutes to ask all the questions I need, she’ll talk for 60. Love her.

Anyway, since the VA office is kind in flux (being absorbed into the hospital), there’s no real live clinic for me to go to this time. All my blood work & ultrasounds are being done at the hospital this time. Which honestly, I prefer. Although I have confidence in my doctor, his bedside manner leaves a lot to be desired…he drew my blood once (once!) last round and it was like being run over by a car. Plus the (internal) ultrasounds were horribly uncomfortable – he wasn’t very sympathetic when my ovaries were the size of baseballs. He was churned my insides up with that stupid wand while I had my hand on my abdomen trying to keep my internals internal. So yay…he won’t be doing them this time. I’ll get a sweet little nurse from the lab who will take 2 seconds to draw my blood and somebody much more gentle from the ultrasound department. Things are looking up.

Plus, I’ve only got to have blood work / ultrasounds done THREE times - every other day (first one on April 2nd). I swear last time I was in there every single day for a week. Or maybe I was just that traumatized and it FELT like every day.

I was talking to the nurse and I mentioned that so far this seems to be going by a lot faster than last time and for whatever reason seems a lot less stressful. I don’t mean in the way of injections or anything (the worse is yet to come and boy do I know it). But my phone isn’t ringing off the hook a zillion times a day from the clinic (they were really unorganized last time). The doctor’s not trying to track me down for whatever reason. I’m done dealing with the pharmacy and my insurance. Last time all that really seemed to drag out through the whole experience. It was a HUGE pain in the ass and very stressful on top of going through the whole IVF process. My nurse made the comment: “Yeah, your last cycle was pretty awful – nothing went right, did it?” No kidding, sistah.

I won’t even SEE my doctor again until we’re in FL and I’m being hooked up to an IV. Sounds scary, but I’m actually relieved. Like I said, total confidence in his doctoring skills, but his bedside manner adds to my nervous wimpy-ness. So…for the most part we are on our own, which is fine by me. We know what meds need to be taken and when, how much, how to mix. I feel like a pharmacist. Or a drug dealer. J

There are a couple things to be resolved before we get to FL though. One: How they do the embryo transfer. They can either do laparoscopic surgery to drop them in my fallopian tubes, or we try the “normal” transfer again, but we’ve got to be careful of my tilted uterus. If we do the “normal” transfer, he wants to do a “mock transfer” a few days prior to basically practice on me. We’re talking VERY painful stuff here. I don’t want to do it the REAL time and now he wants to throw one in for fun? Hmm. I don’t care about having actual surgery for the laparoscopy, but what I DO mind is them dropping more than two embryos in me, which they would most certainly do (he mentioned 5 or 6) to give me a better shot at becoming prego. I will NOT have a selective reduction. Absolutely will not. So we still need to hash all this out.

The second thing we need to agree on before this goes down: Progesterone Intramuscular Injections. Daily. For 3 months. Does that at all sound appealing to anyone? Of course not. Especially when progesterone gel (it’s administered like monistat) is proven to work exactly the same, and it’s completely painless. I did the gel last time. And I know that stuff worked because my period lasted for almost 2 weeks after I went off of it. It lined my uterus…there is no doubt about it. And the doctor even admits there’s no difference just “the European way of thinking vs. the American way of thinking.” Well, I’m with the Brits on this one. Sorry, Bush…take your intramuscular injections and go find an actual terrorist. I’m out.

I’ve done some research and found an Oxford Medical Journal piece on how effective the gel is. I will be armed with that when I get down to FL. Even if he doesn’t agree…I’ve got enough gel to get through until my pregnancy test…so I’ll use the crap with or without his consent. I’m not going to put myself through more barbaric injections for no good reason. And I won’t be guilted into it just because he can’t come up with a better reason. No sir-ee…just not gonna do it.

Other than all that – I’m feeling pretty good. Still having headaches…still having the shortness of breath once in a while. Had a major bout of insomnia last night. Got about 2 hours of sleep - total. But surprisingly, I’m not tired today. Of course it’s almost 80 degrees…so all I want to do is run outside and play.

Oh, here’s a question for you. Do you think there’s the possibility that people are more fertile in the spring? I mean the planet is coming back to life, the flowers, the trees, the animals, the insects. The birds…the bees. There’s got to be something to that, don’t you think? I know in the winter, I want to hibernate. Maybe because it’s Spring, my body will WANT to get pregnant. We’ll see….